by Donna Karan
—
At home, the fighting raged on. I don’t know how my stepfather put up with it, but it was his first and only marriage, so maybe he thought he had to. Or maybe he hung in there for me. The two of us had a close, private relationship, apart from Queenie. Harold gave me the priceless gift of making me feel special and talented. We’d go to his favorite Chinese restaurant, and he’d let me talk about my future. By now I knew I didn’t have the talent to dance or sing professionally; fashion seemed the obvious path, given my love of art. He told me I should have my own company, and suggested that I switch my first and middle names and call it Ivy Doná (pronounced “Do-nay”) because it sounded fancy. I loved his sweetness and how seriously he took my chatter.
All these years, I was still going to Camp Alpine every summer, and I grew to love it. Camp was my independence; I was away from my mother (and her scolding) and free to find myself. We were all equals there, creating our own community. We slept in the same bunk and wore the same camp clothes. I became a major jock, playing basketball, volleyball, baseball, you name it. Camp Alpine was where I got the nickname “Spaghetti Legs and a Meatball Head.” I never felt pretty as a kid; I thought I was odd-looking—tall, skinny, and flat-chested—and the nickname only reinforced that feeling. So I stuffed toilet paper into my bikini top. One time we were in the pool, all lined up, when my top got wet, and shreds of toilet paper started leaking out and got stuck in the pool filter. The camp had to drain the whole pool because “some girl clogged it up with toilet paper.” Everyone knew it was me. I was mortified. And then came the song the other kids made up about me:
Spaghetti legs and a meatball head,
Spaghetti legs and a meatball head,
Spider legs, tortoise head,
You’d like peanut butter better instead.
Camp Alpine is where I met my friend Beverly Adwar. Her father, a Sephardic Jew from Israel, was in the jewelry business. Beverly was the shortest girl in the camp, and I was the tallest. We were both jocks and bonded right away. We played a mean game of chicken in the pool. I’d put little Beverly on my shoulders, and we’d knock down every competing team.
Much as I loved sports at camp, Beverly says she always knew I was going to be an artist of some sort. While other kids wrote letters home during our rest periods, I would draw in my sketchbook. I was in all the plays, singing and dancing.
I was into boys, too. I had no issues there, maybe because I was a jock, or maybe because most of my friends were boys and I knew how to joke with them, how to laugh and flirt. My first kiss was in the first or second grade in the school cafeteria. His name was Michael Sprinzen, and he took my bandana, held it up next to our faces, and kissed me behind it. I had a boyfriend named Bruce at camp who was older than I and super-skinny. We held hands and danced in the canteen to the tunes on the jukebox.
Beverly also lived in Saddle Ridge Estates, and during the school year we went horseback riding every Sunday morning at Hempstead Riding Academy. My mom would yell the whole way in the car, her usual stuff, and Beverly thought nothing of it. She admired Queenie because she had a career, while most moms, like hers, stayed home. I loved Beverly’s family, and fortunately, they loved me back. In the summer, I joined her and her parents, two sisters, and brother in their cabana at El Patio at Atlantic Beach. I spent the Jewish holidays with them, too. My family wasn’t especially observant, and when you don’t have religious touchstones in your life, you crave them. At least I did. I hungered for anything that would make me feel the same as everyone else and less of an outsider.
My father’s death and my mother’s distance shaped me in so many ways. I still hate being alone. I look to create a sense of family everywhere I go. And most important, I’ve learned that I can live with loss. Losing someone may be devastating, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t joy ahead.
Credit 1.1
Credit 1.2
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THE OTHER SIDE OF THE TRACKS
We moved yet again in 1960, when I was twelve. Gail was getting married, and to help pay for the wedding, my mother sold the house. Crazy, I know, but those were her priorities. We moved to the other side of town, closer to the railroad tracks. It was a two-family house, and the people downstairs owned it. They were nice, but living in a shared house by the train tracks was a world away from Saddle Ridge Estates. There was no community to take care of you, no playing safely on the streets like I used to. West Broadway, a major thoroughfare, was just a block away. Queenie was happy because she could walk to the train, but I felt disoriented.
Gail was twenty now, and she was marrying a great guy named Hank Hoffman. Hank had his own recording studio and wrote the 1962 hit “Bobby’s Girl.” He eventually went to RCA, where he worked for twenty-six years. Gail and Hank’s wedding took place at the Hampshire House on Central Park South, the same place my mother married Harold. Gail had no say in the planning and didn’t even get to see the space before Queenie made a deposit for Christmas Day, because that was the only day it was available. The room accommodated only ninety people, so many relatives weren’t invited, and Gail and Hank could invite only one friend each. Hank’s sister Elaine and I were the bridal party.
The wedding was Queenie’s show. She wouldn’t let Harold walk Gail down the aisle because she said she needed him to walk her down the aisle, so my uncle Lou escorted Gail. But first, poor Harold burned his hand while ironing his trousers—his hand literally stuck to the iron! And then there was my itching fit, the worst I’ve ever experienced. My mother had a dress made for me in silk organza, and during the fitting, we discovered that I was highly allergic to its chemical finish. “Don’t worry, Donna, you won’t be allergic to it once the dress is made,” she said, explaining that the unfinished seams were the problem, as if that made any sense.
Well, I remained allergic—horribly so. I broke out in big, angry hives. In the middle of the wedding reception, I went up to the hotel room we’d rented for the night and put on my white and red sweats, the only other clothes I had with me. I rejoined the party and danced like crazy with my big swollen face. After all her careful preparations, my mother was probably upset to have me looking like that in public, but I’m also sure she was happy to see me dancing. Otherwise, she would have yanked me off the floor.
Gail’s leaving home was difficult for me. She was so loving and very maternal, and she let me hang out with her and her friends. I could tell her anything, and she never criticized me. She also knew what it was like to live at home and comforted me in private when our mother was unreasonable. No one knew better than Gail how scary my mother could be. Once Queenie gave me a watch for my birthday. When I lost it the next day while swimming in the ocean, I called Gail immediately. “Oh my God,” I cried into the phone. “What am I going to do? She’ll kill me!”
“Calm down,” Gail said. “I’ll replace it somehow. If she notices it’s gone, tell her you took it to the repair shop to fix the band.” Gail didn’t have a lot of money, but she replaced the watch. That’s how she took care of me. When she moved out, I lost both my ally and a loving mother figure. When Queenie and Harold weren’t arguing, I don’t remember hearing any voices in our home.
—
A few years later, Gail, who was now living half an hour away in Hollis, Queens, had a baby. In the hospital, my mother insisted that Gail and Hank name the baby Gabriel after my father, as she had already called every family member, including Hank’s, to tell them about “baby Gabby.” When Hank stood his ground and refused, Queenie caused a scene so dramatic that the baby ended up going home with no name on his birth certificate. A week later, they named him Glen, the G in honor of Gabby. This did not satisfy my mother. She was so hurt (and probably embarrassed for having told everyone about “baby Gabby”) she refused to meet the baby for six months. When she finally did, she wouldn’t acknowledge his name. She called him “Mr. G” instead.
Harold visited Glen every Sunday, with or without my mother. He loved being a grandfather, and I loved
being an aunt. Queenie loved her grandson, but she wasn’t the cuddly type, whereas I could play with him all day long and sleep next to him at night when I babysat. To me, he was pure joy.
—
Maybe because we lived by the railroad tracks, my mother was more paranoid about my safety than ever and was constantly warning me to be on guard. One day I had just gotten a haircut in Cedarhurst and was feeling great. I decided to walk home to Woodmere along the tracks, maybe an hour’s walk away. A creepy-looking guy on a bike started following me, saying over and over, “Me alova yua.” I got scared. I lied and told him my father was a policeman, but he didn’t back off. So I pointed to a house, said, “I live here,” and walked toward it. The guy turned toward the house, too. Damn. So I knocked on the door. A middle-aged man opened it.
“I’m so sorry,” I said in a panicked rush before he could speak. “There’s a guy following me. Can you make like I live here and that you’re my father?” The man shooed the guy away and wound up walking me home, being very decent about the whole thing. But that story could have turned out very differently.
Another traumatic thing happened when I was a teenager: My dentist sexually harassed me. In those days, dentists put a gas mask on you and completely knocked you out. I remember hearing him say, “Open your mouth wider,” which is normal for a dentist, but there was something creepy about the way he said it. The first couple of times he touched me, I didn’t know anything was happening, but my body seemed to know. I’d try to fight the anesthesia and cross my legs tightly. One time I felt him touching my breast. I punched him and never went back. These incidents reinforced everything my mother had told me about being alone and watching out for danger, and they left me with a deep feeling of helplessness and vulnerability. To this day, I never drink too much or do recreational drugs because I am terrified to feel even slightly out of control. Once you have a fear, any kind of fear, it’s always inside, a part of you.
Of course, if you’d met me back then, you wouldn’t have known I was so afraid. I wasn’t a rebel, but I had an edge. I’ve always been a funny mix of insecure and outgoing. I was an oddball, but I grew to own my oddballness. And I’ve never had a filter. On my first day at Hewlett High School, I went up to Ilene Wetson, soon to be one of my best friends, and said, “You’re the girl who just got a nose job, aren’t you? How could that be a nose job? It looks just like mine!”
High school was incredibly hard. First, I was a terrible student, awful at reading, writing, and math—all the basics. Years later, I learned that I had attention deficit disorder and dyslexia, but those things weren’t diagnosed in those days. You were just a bad student. I’m a visual person, an organic thinker. But traditional education didn’t give you credit for that—not really. I was never taught to use my imagination or see the world in my own unique way. I was taught to reproduce what existed—something I didn’t have the skills to do effectively. My intelligence was wrapped in creativity, self-expression, and street smarts. It never occurred to me to value and embrace those qualities. I just wanted to fit in.
But I stood out in every way, even physically. I was always among the tallest girls in my class, and by high school I was already a towering 5′7″. I must have slumped, because my mother was always telling me to stand up straight. Then there was the money thing. All the families I knew were extremely wealthy and lived in massive houses, not modest ones like mine. That only added to my sense of being different, an outsider.
I skipped classes. I even failed typing—who fails typing? But I excelled in art. I hung out with the creative kids, like Ross Bleckner, the artist, who is still a dear friend today. Ross and I connected quickly, teasing each other in class. We saw in each other a like-minded soul who didn’t fit into the conventional Five Towns world. Neither of us was on the road to becoming a doctor, lawyer, or captain of industry.
So art was my salvation. The Hewlett High School art department was a world unto itself—it even had a separate side entrance—and I felt empowered there and part of a community. I had two exceptionally inspirational teachers: Don Dunne, a handsome, cool guy who taught us to draw the body and was more fine-arts-oriented, and Geraldine Peterson, who had us do still lifes. She would line up pottery for us to draw and shade. I loved sketching and could keep at it for hours on end. Mrs. Peterson loved how I drew and would encourage me to stay in the workroom as long as I wanted. My friends and I still talk about the influence those teachers had on us. They urged us to express ourselves. To a kid who felt lost and outside the community, it was validating. The good grades they gave us were the only reason some of us graduated from high school.
As I found my way in high school, I grew more interested in fashion as a means of self-expression. It was the era of the Danskin bodysuit, and I had every style—V-neck, scoop-back, bateau, long-sleeve, short-sleeve—in every color. They looked great with everything. Stylewise, I was a hippie. I liked extremes—hot pants, short skirts, and long skirts to the floor. I was a cut-on-the-bias girl, as opposed to straight-grade shifts, which I considered dresses for temple. I preferred liquid, body-conscious styles because they were less restrictive, and I was all about dance and movement. My mother was now working at the sportswear company Mr. Pants, and I was able to buy hip-huggers and bell-bottoms at wholesale—a real coup for a teenager. For shoes, I loved gladiator sandals that laced up the leg, but I appreciated that every other girl loved Pappagallo shoes, the hot shoe of the moment. My friend Francine LeFrak, whom I saw on the bus every day, had a pair in every color. When she’d get on the bus, my eyes would immediately drop to her feet to see which pair she was wearing.
I should be clear, though: I was only a hippie in terms of my style. I wasn’t having sex, doing drugs, or even listening to rock and roll. I wasn’t fearless and rebellious; I was wholesome. I liked Disney movies, and I loved Annette Funicello. I listened to the Temptations and the Supremes. I was obsessed with variety shows and adored medical dramas like Dr. Kildare and, later, Marcus Welby, M.D. (whose young star, James Brolin, would go on to marry my friend Barbra Streisand). For me, the hippie thing was an artistic expression. There were no political or cultural undertones to it.
When I was fourteen, I lied about my age and got a job at Shurries, a trendy fashion boutique on Central Avenue in Cedarhurst. It sold all the hip, young clothes of the time: jeans, T-shirts, maxis, minis, all the must-have pieces. The young girls who came in connected with me because I was one of them. Parents loved me, too, and asked me to create mini wardrobes for their kids, pick outfits for social events, and pack them up for camp. I was great at styling, and I learned the importance of merchandising, not that I knew to call it that then. Instead of hanging up all the tops in one place and all the bottoms in another, I mixed it up. I’d style a great top and display it between pants and a skirt, visually explaining the possibilities to the customers, showing them what could go with what. I rearranged the sales floor and styled the mannequins, adding a tuck here for attitude, a slung belt, a cool scarf. I still style the floor whenever I’m in a store that sells my clothes. For me, it’s a compulsion. I don’t even realize I’m doing it half the time.
The owners of Shurries adored me. They even let me paint a mural on the dressing room wall of a girl walking her little dog—my first real fashion illustration.
Fashion was my comfort zone. I accepted that it was in my DNA, that I was naturally good at it. I put on my first fashion show in high school. It was for a project for Kenneth Goode, another favorite teacher in the art department, where we turned illustrations into clothes. I designed the clothes, and a girl I knew helped sew them: a geometric-print black-and-white halter jumpsuit, a tank top and bias-cut palazzo pants, a short dress. My friends and I modeled. Ilene’s mother bought the jumpsuit, and Ilene still owns it. I loved every minute of it. My mother was overjoyed and couldn’t stop bragging about me. Once I accepted fashion as my destiny, she became more of a mom to me than she’d ever been.
I discovered another lifelong p
assion at that time. One day, while still in my teens, I was walking down Broadway in Woodmere when I passed a storefront with a sign for a yoga class. I didn’t know anything about yoga but thought I’d give it a try. From the first class, I loved it. It felt like a form of dance, a great excuse to stretch and move my long legs. There was no real spiritual element to it, which was a shame. I could have started my inward path so much earlier! Nonetheless, I was hooked.
Around this time, I started dating my first steady boyfriend and future first husband, Mark Karan. We met while I was on vacation with my mother in Miami during my junior year of high school. She occasionally went to Miami Beach alone, to take a break from her exhausting schedule, always staying at the Eden Roc hotel, where our uncle Lou’s sister was head of reservations. As a gift for my sixteenth birthday, she took me along.
Mark was two years older than I, a freshman at the University of Tampa, and he’d driven down to Miami with friends for vacation. We met on the 48th Street beach. He had a hip way about him—he was very comfortable and outgoing and could talk to anyone (he still can). I loved that he was tall and slim; I clearly had a thing for skinny guys. And I remember that he was very, very suntanned. I first thought it was because we were in the Florida sun, but came to learn that he always had a suntan, and still does even now.
